


to live in the weak and the wounded

by lionheartland



Category: The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Character Study, Death, Drabble, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 13:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1268860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionheartland/pseuds/lionheartland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Leisel, a matter which I've already cleared, Leisel I wanted to be. Dirty scrunched knees and crooked front teeth, breathing veins and tingling blood, life personified and summarized. But Max, mind me, Max I wanted to have.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	to live in the weak and the wounded

Ever since this happened, I have often found myself contemplating about how - and even more precisely, fiercely, why - I should start to tell you about all of this.   
  
My go-to conundrum is easy to figure out, you see: there is no way for a bringer of the end to know anything about beginnings. Really reaps compassion, doesn't it quite?  
  
Perhaps I ought to pick through the day I first saw the Jewish fist fighter, and do it in the innermost attentive manner - like braiding a handful of wheat hair or hunting down a murky rabbit, but there would be too much grace in that, and not enough caution. Our catalyst is not a thing to approach without caution, as I'm sure you'll understand soon, if not too late.   
  
That day, the sky looked like a memory you cannot misplace, not your car keys or your first grade crush, nothing so trivial, nothing so mundane; it was the unspoken syllable laced with one's dying, fluttering breath, the answer found in a stale water of questions, somewhere between lidded consciousness and sleep, or even the lie you always anchored your truths to, until that final moment, glimmering gleaming pulsating second, in which the eyes of your soul drift towards closure, and towards me.   
  
But I divert - the sky, akin to a memory, is now a real memory of a sky who wasn't, so all in all, it couldn't account to less in what I am about to unveil.   
  
Skip a few years, if you please, to when a boy with a cut-flower smile grasps in realization the fact that, as we've already guessed, he is going to die. It's all the better to come to terms with it from a young age, may I say so myself, and perchance that was the pin point moment in which I've acknowledged his _differentness_. When his life intertwined with another death-stained child, the book thief, I've almost made to search for the reason, because even in billions and billions of work cases, paper files stacked up in eternity, there never were two temptations glued so unsubtly together, as though only to call me closer, sooner.   
  
I did indeed search for the reason, years later and years before, in hours dampened and hours damned, where Max was either alone, either surrounded by people who sang into the emptiness of him. One might trust those as the same things, but in actuality they're as diverse as meanings can grow to be. To enrich and enlarge the parameters of my quest, I even - and you ought to forgive the feather stinging shame that seeps through these lines - drowned myself in several fleshy carcases, bodies, as you name them. "Mistakes are human", what a funny, funny concept!   
  
I never stood for long, just to steal a glance, a glow of lively quietude, unbowed distress; in the rock square corners of half abandoned streets, a gardner or a sweeper would laugh to nothing and no one, for (and because of) two kids who although had had the chance to meet me early, meet me bright, carried on as if I was torn from the earth they danced upon.   
  
Leisel, a matter which I've already cleared, Leisel I wanted to be. Dirty scrunched knees and crooked front teeth, breathing veins and tingling blood, life personified and summarized.   
  
But Max, mind me, Max I wanted to have.   
  
So perhaps I'm going to start not with the first time I saw him, but the first time he saw _me_.   
  
Thoughts are dangerous.   
  
He frowned, then the frown dissolved into a brandishing mask of curiosity (and oh, how I envied that, the perspective of something still being undiscovered, undisclosed, undissimulated) and furthermore into a smile of some sorts. A thing to know about Max Vandenburg: he lived in an exclamation mark. There were no questions the world held back from him, no hesitating commas morphed into lethargy, no obstructing fullstops.   
  
Words are even more dangerous.   
  
The exclamation mark was used to address to me as well, and his skin creaked around the corners of his mouth, a peculiar color if I've ever seen one: night burnt just like some people get sun burnt, dark not through the absence of light, but rather the absence of everything, a child laughing his way out of the void. I would've adivsed him to remain there, but, as you've been informed many times before, I'm never there for the beginning.   
  
Beliefs are the most dangerous of all.   
  
These three are, to some extent, the single things I cannot gather when you die.   
  
I've thought, said, and believed this, all in one flashing second (I've found that seconds really do burst into a lifetime when you're human, and it's a typical, specific, god-awful feature) : 'At last, at least, a story for me.'

**Author's Note:**

> Uh, this is rubbish, but I loved, loved, loved the pairing and I just /had to/, you know the drill. Probably-to-be-deleted-soon flag waving all over this. God bless you, and may God also have mercy on your soul if you read the obsolete, absolute pile of nonsense from above.


End file.
